What do Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, and War of the Worlds have in common? They’re all free for anyone to use however they like! That’s the wonder of the public domain. Although, even as legal complications are stripped away, storytelling complications emerge. How do you make your version stand out while also keeping the aspects that fans most love? We’ve got some tips for you!

• Steamboat Willie 

Generously transcribed by Michael Martin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

 Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. 

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: Okay, so we’re gonna make a new movie. It’s gonna have a bunch of beloved cartoon characters. We can have Mickey Mouse, obviously, but only the Steamboat Willie version of him. Don’t you dare give him gloves or make his pants colored.

Bunny: [chuckles]

Oren: and also Winnie the Pooh. But he cannot have a shirt. That will get us in deep trouble if he has a red shirt.

Chris: [laughs] 

Oren: We can have Tigger now though, so that’s nice.

Bunny: So much of what qualifies is based on clothing, as it turns out.

Oren: Yeah, and obviously they’re all gonna be, like, slasher murderers, I guess, is the hot new thing to do with characters that suddenly enter the public domain.

Bunny: Wow, I’ve never seen that before. Fresh new take on Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh.

Oren: Yeah, that’s just how one does now.

Chris: Gotta make it darker and grittier.

Oren: Obviously Sherlock Holmes has to be there. He’s like, required to be in every public domain retelling. 

Bunny: Is he a murderer too?

Oren: Maybe. Who knows, right? He could be solving murders. We’ll never know.

Bunny: Maybe he’s like a demonic animatronic.

Oren: Ooh. Yeah

Bunny: Those are pretty popular with the kids, so I’ve been told.

Oren: Yeah, “Five Nights at Holmes’.” Alright, so today we’re talking about telling public domain stories, which is a thing that people really like to do, and it’s not just because I had to read The Right Sort for our Hugo guesses.  It is because of that, but not only because of that.

Chris: Have we told anybody about the Hugo guesses? Any of our listeners, I should say.

Oren: I mean, we’ve complained about the books we were reading for it before.

Chris: Uh, yeah. Maybe they put together that we compiled a document of “Hugo bait,” we call them, because we’re trying to guess which books might get nominated because once they’re nominated, we don’t really have time to read them all, so we gotta start early.

Oren: Which is one of my many beefs with the way that the Hugos are run is that most people voting have not read all the books on the list. But I realize that’s just not practical the way they’re set up. But I’m gonna try to do it, okay? Because I actually get to vote on them this year.

Bunny: It’s also so dependent on which ones don’t have five hundred holds at the library.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: Which is unfortunate because the ones with more holds might be more likely to win. But, you know, I’m not salty.

Chris: Why we think it might be possible because years ago when we covered all of the Hugo novels we found when they were announced that Oren had already listened to three of them. Like, half of them. 

Chris & Bunny: [laughter]

Chris: It’s like, okay, well that happened by chance. Maybe if we do it on purpose we can figure it out.

Oren: Yeah. We are gonna be in trouble if one of them is a sequel, though.

Chris: Yeah. I’m not going there. That’s too far.

Oren: But anyway. So, today is about public domain stories. The Hugos will come later. But first, legal stuff. The public domain is stuff that theoretically no one has copyright ownership over. And so anyone can use it in any way that they want. In practice it’s not always that simple. Sometimes rights holders will find creative ways to sue you for using things that should be in the public domain. 

Most recently, the Doyle Estate sued Netflix over the Enola Holmes movies claiming that Holmes can’t be emotional ’cause that only happens in the later Holmes stories, which were still under copyright at the time. Which was legally very dubious, but we’ll never know how it would’ve turned out ’cause they immediately settled out of court and we don’t know what the terms of that settlement were.

Chris: Yeah, I find it very hard to believe that that Holmes Estate would’ve actually—the Doyle Estate, I should say—would’ve actually won that lawsuit. But even so, I mean, it’s expensive.

Oren: Yeah. It seems likely that Netflix gave them some amount of money to go away. That’s my guess. But who knows, right? Maybe Netflix told them, if you do this, we will ruin you ’cause we have billions of dollars. And they were like, “Oh, okay. We don’t want any of this.” And then left.

Chris: The hardest is if you wanna find old movies that are in public domain, because that—it gets extremely complicated because of all of the different people who put creative input into a movie. Anything like the costume, for instance—somebody could have the IP over that. So if you show a scene with a particular costume in it.

And so it’s almost impossible for anybody to say for sure what movies are public domain, right? They can kind of guess if it’s like a silent film, right? It’s probably public domain, but it’s real bad. Thankfully it’s, you know, less complicated with text works. Although you do have to be careful about translations. Because the translation can also be copyrighted. So if it’s an old work in a recent translation, you know, luckily if you were telling our own version, then you know, we’re gonna be rewriting the text anyway, so that may not matter. But if you, for instance, wanna quote like a classic story at the top of a chapter or something, that could matter.

Oren: There was one novel that I was reading—I’m not gonna say what it was on the off chance that some lawyer is listening. I don’t wanna get the author in trouble if this is something that he could get in trouble over. I don’t know. But it was a novel that was based off of clearly public domain work. Seems fine, right? And there was a character in it who wasn’t in the original. Again, seems fine. They invented a new character. But on closer reading this character was clearly lifted from another retelling of the original story that was definitely still in copyright.

Chris: Hmm.

Oren: And now I’m just kind of wondering, like, would that author get in trouble if someone who owns the copyright to the older retelling decided to press it… And I don’t know. I’m very curious.  

Chris: I mean, possibly if it’s distinct enough. I think this is the issue with Disney doing all of these fairytale stories is that, you know, kids—the Disney version for them is the original version. And then they think of that as, like, our iconic story. But Disney owns all of the details of that adaptation that were unique. So, it’s kind of a problem.

Bunny: Public domain is also weird because it’s different in different countries. So James Bond is public domain in Canada, but it won’t be public domain in the US until 2035. And apparently Peter Pan, which is public domain in the US, is not yet public domain in the UK. So I legitimately have no idea how selling stories across these borders work when a character is public domain in one area and not the other.

Oren: Yeah. So, just be cautious. Especially if you are approaching a character or story that has only recently entered the public domain. Especially if Disney is associated with it. ‘Cause even if you are technically in the right, Disney can find ways to make your life difficult, should your story achieve any kind of success.

Bunny: Yeah. And they will go after you for anything.

Oren: They are famously litigious.

Bunny: People have been trying to recreate, like obviously, Wizard of Oz, one of the more prominent inclusions in the public domain. The Disney Wizard of Oz—is that Disney? Whatever. The movie version of Wizard of Oz—

Oren: That’s Universal, I think.

Bunny: Universal? Okay. The Margaret Hamilton version. Every adaptation of the Wizard of Oz after that one has been trying to recreate Margaret Hamilton’s witch dress, and you are not allowed to do that. That witch dress is the property of the movie, so don’t you dare lay fingers on that black witch dress we have known and loved.

Oren: Yeah, I think it was Lindsay Ellis has a video about how Disney has been desperately trying to recreate that iconic look because that’s one of the few things they don’t own and they, like, have to be really careful what they do or they could run afoul of the copyright. It’s very funny.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: So my experience with this is, of course, that I did a retelling of The Snow Queen  recently. And one thing: the version of The Snow Queen, I think, in film that most people are most likely to be familiar with and that I knew well was the Hallmark version. Which I think is technically a movie, but it’s more like a mini series. The thing is, in any version of The Snow Queen you have to impose some kind of deadline for the plot to work so that you have actual tension. And I think that when it had, like, the winter solstice, which is the most natural deadline to put. But then I was like, okay, now I have to find a new deadline because now I’m afraid—even though I know as a storyteller that any story should really do this. Right? And that’s just the obvious one when you’re talking about the winter. Now, I felt like I have to find something different just because I don’t wanna do something that’s precisely like another retelling I’m familiar with. So I decided to go with the first snowfall instead. But sometimes that gets tricky.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: So at this point, it might be useful to talk about why even do retellings? Why not just make every story a hundred percent original? A complete break from whatever came before. Just lock yourself in a box and don’t be exposed to culture.

Bunny: Easy. 

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: That’s the dream, actually.

Oren: Yeah. And there are some obvious benefits. I mean, first of all, if you are drawing from an established work you don’t have to think of as much. For some people that will be restrictive, but for other people, they’re like, “No, actually that helps. That allows me to focus on the stuff I want to do and not have to do as much, you know, world building drudgery” or what have you. Right? 

So that’s a benefit right there. It also could just be that’s a story you’re passionate about ’cause you liked it as a kid or what have you. And then from a sales perspective, that story, if it’s big enough to be worth retelling, probably already has a built-in audience. So you can get some benefit there.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I had a bad time because when I was almost done with The Snow Queen, there was a lot of demand for fairytale retellings. Like they were a hot commodity. But then by the time I finished it, there was like a glut of them on the market. So I think a lot of public domain stories, honestly, have pretty high competition because there are a lot of other people also telling a public domain story that’s popular. At the same time, if you do need a fast pitch, right? I can see how Sherlock and Space—right?—might help you sell your book to people.

Bunny: It’s quite evocative. Like people know exactly what you’re talking about and you’re already supposed to, like, compare your work to existing works when you’re querying agents and, like, pitching to publishers. So it’s even more straightforward when you’re just like, “Oh, it’s a retelling of this thing. You know this thing.”

Chris: Yeah. I mean, if you need comps, right? Comparables to pitch your book. You might be able to just look up, okay, what are the other retellings of this public domain story that have happened in the last ten years? And maybe you would find some decent comparables out of that. But by default it’s not gonna stand out in the market because anybody can retell that story. So it becomes more important to give it your own vision and set it apart in some way. Because you can’t just say, “Hey, this is Sherlock,” as your pitch.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And that was another thing I had trouble with too, right? I, like, kind of had a pitch, but not something that’s as simple as “Sherlock in space.”

Bunny: Fundamentally, by definition, the story has been done before probably many times.

Oren: I read a novel once that was just pitching itself as being, like, an official Sherlock story. ‘Cause I guess whoever wrote it got, like, a stamp of approval from the Doyle Estate and I read it and it was very dull.

Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]

Oren: It’s like, yeah, this is…I’ve read Sherlock before. That’s what this is. 

Bunny: Ugh. Man. I feel like the worst thing an estate can do is start having, like, “canon wars.” What’s cannon or not? We’ve already seen that with Star Wars. Well, let’s not do it with Holmes. That’s my advice.

Oren: Yeah. Yeah, fortunately all of Holmes is public domain now, at least in the US. So you know, if the Doyle Estate decides to sue you for, I don’t know, giving Sherlock a fancy hat, you have a stronger leg to stand on than you did before.

I do find the question interesting about whether you’re gonna do, like, an indirect retelling, in which this is clearly based on an older product and you’re not trying to hide it. Versus just using the same characters or same place names or what have you. 

Bunny: Yeah, I think that a lot of fairytale retellings at least benefit from their original material being extremely simple with lots of room for extrapolation. So, if you’re retelling Red Riding Hood in space with a bunch of wolf soldiers and cyborgs and stuff—which is Scarlet of The Lunar Chronicles—Like, you have lots and lots and lots of room for interpretation. 

If you’re retelling the…I don’t know, The Scarlet Letter, there’s a lot more specifics there than, you know, little girl travels through the woods, gets eaten by wolf.

Chris: Although I would say personally that yes, they’re a little vaguer, but you still have choices about how much you want to stick to the plot or not stick to the plot. Right? And so, it’s a very different kind of retelling if you are taking kind of that vague inspiration and using some of the same themes and you’re using some of the same kind of characters supposedly. Like for instance, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik is supposed to be a retelling of Rapunzel; it’s only sort of, kind of. I mean, I would’ve never guessed, right? Now that I know it I can see the inspiration in the story, but it’s just a very different thing.

Oren: Yeah, I would never offer that story to someone and say this is a Rapunzel retelling. 

By the way, we mentioned Spinning Silver. So everyone at home take a drink.

Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]

 Chris: Or Frozen is supposed to be a retelling of The Snow Queen. But they’re not the same story anymore.

Bunny: There’s snow in it.

Oren: Chris, you have to let that go.

Chris: No. It was so disappointing! But I mean, on the plus side, I would’ve not probably—maybe I wouldn’t have made my own version if I had actually liked the Disney… You know, I didn’t have any problem with the movie Frozen. It just wasn’t the story I love.

Bunny: Are you saying that Follow the Sound of Snow was a spite project fired by Frozen?

Chris: No. [laughs] But if you will buy it, I will say that.

I think that in general with public domain stories, that there’s not as much of an expectation then if you, for instance, had a copyrighted story that only had, like, one movie studio licensing it and there was only gonna be one big film adaptation, for instance. And then there probably won’t be another one for twenty years. Then it’s like the stakes are super high, and so all the fans that want it to be true to the story—right?—really care what it does. Whereas anybody can tell it, I don’t think people expect you to adhere as closely to that source material. I do think that I, you know, had a balance where people felt who did, like the original fairytale, really appreciated that I stick as closely as I did, but also that I had my own vision.

Whereas if you’re really a fan of something and you get that like, you know, Frozen. Right? Or you really liked the Rapunzel story for whatever reason and you read Spinning Silver, there’s going to be a little disappointment there.

Bunny: I also think that a lot of the tricks people use to update public domain stories to retell them are kind of overdone, which is another trouble with the whole public-domain-characters-retelling premise. And we pointed out this one: ‘beloved character is a murderer’ is perhaps a very recent prominent one. Apparently we’re getting another, like, Steamboat Willie Slasher. And obviously there was the extremely panned Winnie the Pooh one, because of course. So those are tiresome and usually very cash grabby. Another one that we see a lot is just like, “it’s the exact same story, but it’s modern day.” Which is a fine start, but I think you can’t just have that, right? It’s not enough to just say, “But it’s today.” Or at least it’s not enough to me.

Chris: But what if Beauty and the Beast was not just in modern day, but the Beast was also, just like, a punk with lots of piercings and that makes him very bestial. 

Bunny: Oh man, I’m gonna buy him on a backpack.

Oren: He’s so, “I love you, even though you’re so cool and rad.”

Bunny: I want my lunch bag to have his face on it.

Chris: How can you love a guy with so many piercings?

Oren: I mean, were I to complain I would say that I would like it if retellings that set out to subvert the original, have a little more to say than, “Hey, the stuff that happened in this original was pretty messed up.” Because like, yeah, it was. A lot of the stuff in Arthurian legend is pretty messed up. I knew that. Do you have anything else for me? Like, you know, a story that is interesting? Sometimes the answer is no.

Chris: Right. Whereas a positive: Winter Tide, for instance, is in the kind of Lovecraft universe and takes the Deep Ones that, you know, Lovecraft was super racist towards and makes them main characters. And that one I think is a really good way of responding towards really problematic public domain stories. Where then you kind of feature the perspective of the people who were othered in the original in an insightful way. As opposed to just like, “This is messed up,” and pointing at it.

Oren: Yeah. Winter Tide also has the advantage of just having pretty strong fundamentals, like from a storytelling perspective. It doesn’t just like, tell you, “Hey, this is a Cthulhu retelling and I’m just gonna lean on that for the entire story.” It also has, like, a plot and stuff. It has too many characters, but it’s generally pretty good.

Bunny: Yeah. You can’t forget that you are telling a story. It’s not just a retelling; it’s not just the “re-” part. The “-telling” part is interesting too, and ideally you will show a bit too.

Oren: Or you could just spend a bunch of chapters on backstory for the Knights of the Roundtable, who then never get to do anything in the main story.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: I’m not bitter about The Bright Sword. Stop saying I’m bitter about The Bright Sword.

Palomides and Dinadin seemed kind of cool and they each get, like, one thing to do in the main storyline after we spent who knows how long on their backstories.

Chris: I have to admit there is one pull with the main story that I kind of want to make a darker and grittier version of.

Bunny: Uh-oh.

Oren: Oh yeah?

Chris: And that’s the Christmas Carol. Because every Christmas, there’s so many Christmas Carol stories out there. And it’s, you know, meant to be a feel good story but like, I can’t help but notice that it’s all centered around the feelings of, like, the rich and greedy guy. Right? And the basic narrative is that, “Oh, he just personally has to learn to be good. We don’t need systemic change. He just personally has to learn to be good. And if we just have, you know, one night of  teaching him some lessons, he’ll be good and the problem of, like, capitalism and greed will be fixed.”

Bunny: [in Epic Movie Trailer Voice] December, 2025. Cratchit. Coming to theaters near you.

Chris: And I just wanna take that and make something that’s a little darker to reflect the fact that that’s not enough and have a story that’s not quite so centered around the person who is doing the harm. 

Oren: I realized as I was looking through famous novels from the nineteenth century, most of the ones that you would think about have had a bunch of different retellings. The one that I think has the least—and admittedly this is not an exhaustive search. This is just some casual googling—is Moby Dick. Probably ’cause nobody’s read the original ’cause it’s boring. Where all my Moby Dick retellings at? Like, what is going on?

Bunny: Look, the only one I could see doing a Moby Dick retelling is friend of the show SG, who is quite obsessed with Queequeg and Ishmael kissing.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s a solid start for a story.

Chris: Yeah. Isn’t that story about a guy who really wants revenge on a whale?

Oren: I mean, that’s kind of stretching it because that implies the story is about anything

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: The story is also about telling you extensive and often incorrect whale anatomy.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, it does have a guy who wants revenge on a whale in it.

Chris: Oh. Isn’t that the part that people remember?

Oren: Yeah, that’s the part people remember, but that’s only like 5% of the book.

Chris: Okay. But at the same time, if you’re gonna retell Moby Dick you kind of have to keep the part that’s really iconic.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So I just don’t feel like people want to tell stories about a guy who wants revenge on a whale. I think that would be a little hard for us to take seriously. And also, I don’t know, I personally would find it unpleasant.

Bunny: Modern day audiences might also not take so kindly to the extensive murder of whales that goes on in the book.

Chris: Yeah, the whaling does not look good.

Bunny: There is, like, lots and lots and lots of whaling.

Chris: Yeah. That is not great. I don’t think that would do well.

Oren: I guess if we stretch the definition enough, there are a bunch of stories about a character—sometimes the protagonist, sometimes the villain—who, you know, desires revenge for a past wrong and is destroyed by it.

Bunny: Well, okay. 

Oren: Like the most obvious of that is, like, probably Wrath of Khan, where they just straight up quote Moby Dick to let you know they know what they’re doing.

Bunny: [uncertainly] What is Khan if not a whale?

Oren: No, Kirk is the whale. Khan is Ahab in this scenario.

Bunny: [sarcastically] Ah, I’ve always said Kirk is like a whale.

Oren: Yeah. You know, that’s just what you think about.

Bunny: You know, that time when he bit the leg off of a villain.

Oren: Yeah, that’s happened. That’s actually in the original series episode that Wrath of Khan is a sequel to. He bites Khan’s leg off. Just trust me. Don’t go check.

Bunny: Oh, the original series got weird.

Oren: It did. That part’s not a lie.

My favorite, like weird retelling chain right now is Wicked because—so first you have the original book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Right. And then you have the movie, which no one except Universal can actually directly retell, but that literally everyone is retelling, right? Because people remember the movie way more than they remember the book. So everyone is skirting as close to that line as they possibly can. So then you have the book Wicked, which is way weirder than anyone who’s seen the musical or the movie would think. And then you have the musical, which adapts Wicked, the book, which is adapting both the movie and the original book. And now there’s a movie that is adapting the play, that is adapting the book, that is adapting the movie and the book. And it’s just so hard to figure out where anything in this chain comes from.

Bunny: It’s Wicked all the way down.

Chris: I just love all the people who are discovering the book for the first time, not knowing how messed up it is. Like, “What the hell? I was not prepared for this!”

Oren: “What is going on?”

All: [laughter]

Bunny: You know, I joked about it, but one other—aside from ‘they’re a murderer’ and ‘it’s modern day’—the other big category of retelling is ‘what if they kissed?’ Which is perhaps, of those three, making them kiss and be in a romance is more obviously a story then the other two are. Which I think helps with the popularity of ‘kiss retellings’ because you are putting it in a genre that needs a romance plot and that means plot.

Oren: It does have an obvious selling point.

Bunny: Whereas ‘murderer’ is just like, “It’s a slasher now.” Right? And those don’t really have… like I don’t wanna say slashers don’t have plots, but it’s like—it’s a conceit rather than a plot, if that makes sense.

Oren: Well, and just in general, ‘and then they kissed’ is one of many ways that you can explore some tension or some unresolved question or some implication from the original story. Which is the same drive that all of these, like, ‘What if it was terrible?’ subversions come from. And there are, you know, good and bad ways to do both.

Chris: You can also do things like sequels or what if the lot of the original went differently, right? What if the villain won or something like that. Jim C. Hines has a princess series that takes place after Cinderella, you know, becomes a princess, right? And then she goes on adventures and stuff like that. So it’s basically a sequel to the original Cinderella.

Bunny: The play “Into the Woods” tries to do that, and it’s a very clumsy second half.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a discourse for sure.

All: [chuckling]

Chris: Does that one get really dark?

Oren: It’s the second half when things get dark and, shall we say, the reaction to it is polarizing. A lot of people, myself included, feel like the second half is just kind of pointless misery porn. And other people think that we are unsophisticated Philistines who have no taste. So, you know.

 Chris: Okay, but Oren, what if they didn’t live happily ever after?

Oren: What if they didn’t?

Bunny: Whoa!

Chris: Whoa.

Bunny: What if they were murderers?

Oren: One of my favorite retellings is actually based on the premise ‘What if they didn’t kiss.’ Which is Elementary, which is a Sherlock retelling and with the Watson being played by Lucy Liu.

Bunny: Ah, we love Lucy Liu.

Oren: Yeah, Lucy Liu’s great and fantastic for that role. And you know, they caused like a little bit of a stir of like, “Wah! You made Watson a woman!” But you know, in the end, no one cared. But the thing was that when this happened everyone was kind of convinced, “Okay, you’re doing this so you can make Watson and Sherlock kiss without it being gay, right?” And the producers were like, “No, we’re not doing that. They are not going to kiss.” And we were like, “Uh huh. Yeah, sure.” And we all started checking our watches to see how long they would kiss. And five years later, the show was over and they didn’t kiss!

Bunny: Yay!

Chris: [unenthusiastically] Hooray.

Oren: It was like, “Hooray. My expectations were subverted.”

Bunny: They did it.

Chris & Bunny: [chuckling]

Chris: I should say there is kind of one situation in which you don’t want to add a spin to a public domain story. And that is if you’re doing, like usually they’re for children, but you’re actually deliberately doing a retelling that it’s supposed to be capture the original or whatever is in the popular imagination. So for instance, if you’re also an illustrator and you’re doing like kids picture books and you’re doing a fairytale, that’s a time in which people usually expect you to stay fairly close to the original.

Even so in those situations, you have to just look at…oftentimes public domain stories have some pretty big plot issues, besides the problematic stuff. Like in The Snow Queen, I’ve looked at a lot of adaptations that, even the ones that are very close to the original, are basically repeating the Hans Christian Anderson story with just, like, a few tweaks and a little bit longer prose. And always fix the end because in this story, the main character journeys, like, a really long time to get to the Snow Queen’s palace, and when she reaches the Snow Queen palace, the Snow Queen isn’t even there in the original. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: She’s, like, gone somewhere. And so it’s, like, really anti-climatic. It’s like, wait, she’s supposed to confront the snow queen? No, she just happens to not be home right now. It’s cool.  

Bunny: She went off to deal with a troublesome necromancer and the hobbits are on their own now.

All: [laughter]

Chris: So basically everybody  has the snow queen actually be there somehow, even if otherwise, it’s basically the same as the original. But you know, there’s just little tweaks here and there, and that’s because it’s trying to, again, just be a fairytale book that has meant to capture what we think of as that fairytale.

Oren: Right. For example, the amazing 2005 BBC version has Gerda and The Snow Queen have a Dragonball Z style beam battle at the end, which is the greatest ending that story has ever had. Except for, of course, Follow the Sound of Snow. Just to be clear.

Chris & Bunny: [laughter]

Bunny: Second only.

Oren: But other than that…

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, No. That one is also the one that has Patrick Stewart as a crow or a raven. 

Bunny: That’s great.

Oren: Excuse me.

Chris: Yeah. Excuse me, a raven. Which is great.

Oren: It’s not good in any other way, but it does have those two elements.

Chris: I mean, if you like to watch every single adaptation, every telling of the story like I do, it’s fun to watch.

Oren: For completion’s sake, it’s important.

Bunny: What year was that?

Oren: 2005.

Bunny: Okay. I was gonna say the laser beam battle does sound very 2000’s.

Oren: Alright. Well, I think we are just about out of time. So we are now going to adapt this podcast into an episode that is over.

Chris: If you would like us to continue retelling this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon, go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

 [closing theme]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Colton.